Up and Coming or Rewind and Try Again?

To keep options fresh and to have a little fun… we thought a little “Siskel and Ebert” review of a couple lesser known, yet up and coming social media sites may be worth looking into. We’ve taken some time to thoroughly look at, use and review Medium.com and Thumb.it — which are relatively new but are definitely showing some potential. Keep in mind that they are still early in development so they don’t have the 20 million monthly users yet but your goal is to stay ahead of your competition. Right?

Basically for those who love to write out there the Medium.com platform resembles a blog which makes sense considering it was created by the co-founders of Blogger and Twitter, but the perceived difference will be the quality of content posted that will make this site unique. Medium.com is being hyped as a platform for sharing content that has a deeper value to it than your average social sites offer. This means people want to gain something by reading your posts other than knowing how old your dog is. This isn’t a site that you will need to post to daily, which in turn will help keep the content more meaningful.

If you have any creative writing bug inside this site is definitely worth checking out. Your posts should be thought provoking, informative, and interesting. How will this site help your business? It is a great way to introduce yourself and your company to the world and groups of people. We know… what will you post about? If you take the time and think about it there are many interesting stories you could share that pertain to your business. Start with how you got started, how did you grow the company, share information about your products, and explain why you enjoy doing what you do? There are so many possibilities!

Medium.com makes it very easy to set up an account and get started. The site itself has a great look and is structured well. Given the fact that it is a very new social media platform, a little over a year old, we are sure that tweaks will be made to improve any areas that may be lacking such as the ability to interact with other users within this site. As of now you can share and recommend other people’s posts but their isn’t really an option to comment or personally connect with them. However, you can include links in your posts which could take readers to your Facebook page for example, but we would like to have the ability to contact someone directly on Medium.com. All in all it appears to be a well thought out platform and definitely has the potential to be a high traffic site.We give Medium.com a thumbs up!

Medium.com is easy… almost a pleasure to use. It offers great programming that looks to be continuing to improve, and add quality to its features and the social media community.

Thumb.it — Internet + App Based

Thumb.it started out as “Opinionaided” and only showed limited success early on. Many users were asking questions such as, “Do you prefer white or chocolate milk?”, “Are chocolate chip cookies a good snack?” and “The bathroom door broke while you were at work, how is your day going?” They have gotten better, but this undoubtedly didn’t do too much to promote it’s growth. Recently companies have begun to notice the potential of Thumb.it and that it can be a great market research tool. Thumb.it has grown in popularity, and so has the efforts to improve it. Within the past two years it has been revamped into the platform that you see today. With over a billion responses to questions posted yearly this site continues to generate excitement which could be extremely beneficial to your business. Just imagine, you might come up with a new logo, marketing scheme, products, etc. for your business and want to test the waters before you actually go with it. Post it on Thumb.it and give thousands of users the opportunity to let you know whether it’s The Bomb or A Bomb!!

Image by None via CrunchBase

While Thumb.it is a great concept, actually using it as a tool for market research may not be as easy as it sounds. For it to work properly you really need your target audience to be voting on your posts, not just Tom, Dick, and Harry. Thumb.it is fairly vague about who is actually voting and you don’t seem to have many options available for targeting specific groups of people. Its a bit clunky. There are different levels of paid versions available which give you some added options but it is fairly expensive for the value at this point. Thumb.it has so much potential, but we are going to ask them to take a step back and rethink its basic usability which can be very off-putting. With a little hesitation, we have to put the thumbs down!

Potential for additional improvements and a great market research tool is there, but Thumb.it does not look to be moving in a forward direction just yet. For the many unknowns and not so user friendly interface, the per month cost is a bit high out of the gate.
Either way we hope you take a swing with both Medium.com and Thumb.it to get the experience, learn the potential and possibly find a social media platform that is right for your business. And watch out for more of our social corners reviews next month.